Meta and Blumhouse Create Chatbot That Encourages Phone Use During Movies

“Oh, wow, this is really cool,” Flannery Johnston, 28, said as the chatbot came to life, offering a personalized hello from M3GAN, the diabolical A.I. doll at the center of the movie. Over the next 20 minutes, the chatbot served up about 10 messages. One was a question: “Do you think they’re inventing other dolls like me?” An affirmative reply prompted the response, “Don’t be delulu.”

Ms. Johnston’s interest quickly faded, however.

“I started to feel uncomfortable looking at my phone — I didn’t want to be obnoxious — and basically just waited until after the movie was over to read through all the messages,” she said as the credits rolled. (A critic for the Hollywood trade publication Variety had a similar reaction, calling Movie Mate little more than a marketing gimmick.)

Blumhouse deemed the experiment worthwhile. “The enthusiasm we saw from fans — especially younger ones — shows there’s real interest in finding ways to enhance, not replace, the fun of going to the movies,” Karen Barragan, a spokeswoman for the studio, said in an email on Thursday.

As for the criticisms? “Not everything is going to be for everybody,” she said.

Movie Mate is part of a grand plan by Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, to spread chatbots across all of his apps and other parts of the internet. In Mr. Zuckerberg’s vision of the future, artificially intelligent chatbots will be open to having fun, personalized conversations anywhere at anytime, apparently even inside movie theaters. Meta declined an interview request.

Not everyone in the movie business is jumping at the opportunity. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, a boutique theater chain that caters to film buffs, refused to participate in the Movie Mate rollout, as did a smattering of other theaters across the country. (An Alamo spokesman declined to comment.) But the two biggest multiplex operators, AMC Entertainment and Regal Cineworld, decided to give it a shot, with the stipulation that ticket buyers had to be clearly informed ahead of time about what to expect.